Past Lives

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Olinda

For a heart-hammering second, I teetered on the brink of the abyss. The waterfall thundered away beneath me, down into the waves smashing into the jagged rocks so far below.

In my hands, the metal grate threatened to pull me over the edge. I fell to one knee in the freezing water, hitting hard against the stone bottom. The stream splashed up my chest into my face. My Euzebian scent slits along my neck reflectively snapped closed.

Even as the water fought to shove me out, Drac’s wing swept up against me from behind. Nosferans aren’t all that strong, but it was enough to steady me. I braced myself against the stream.

Once I’d secured myself, I shoved the grate forward into the tunnel, wedging it against the sides and the ends left poking out of the biocrete. Each charge had cut through the metal with a micron-thin slice.

Drac crawled over me, pulling himself into the tunnel. He moved into the tunnel making small whistling noises. Happy? It was his sort of place, after all.

I dragged myself up out of the water. I was completely drenched. The water wouldn’t damage any of my equipment. I’d expected to get somewhat wet, but not completely drenched.

In the tunnel I braced myself. From one of my inner pockets, I took out a tube of Braxian glue, made from the shells of a carnivorous beetle. Difficult to harvest. Expensive, but an extremely effective adhesive.

A couple drops on the ends of the grating, then I lifted it up into place. The glue seized the metal and anchored the grating back into place as good as new. A detailed inspection might turn up what had happened, but I didn’t expect anyone to look. Unless things went really bad, no one would know we’d been here.

Bracing my feet on the sides of the tunnel, bent over thanks to the low ceiling, I followed Drac into the tunnel. He stopped a couple meters in, waving a small egg-shaped device in the air.

“Sensor fields!”

We’d expected that. Drac put away his detector and pulled out a light shimmery cloth from another pouch. The material hardly weighed anything at all. He spread it out, unfolding it into a large cloth.

“Closer!”

This was the part of the plan I didn’t like. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a better suggestion. I moved up close to Drac. I kept my Euzebian scent slits closed. It didn’t entirely cut out the odor but damped it down.

Drac crawled up higher on the tunnel walls. I ducked lower and shivered as he moved and dropped onto my back.

The cloth drifted down over us both, covering us in the almost weightless folds. It was a scatter cloth designed to confuse sensor fields.

Drac’s thin, bony body pressed against mine. He didn’t weigh much at all. It was like being hugged by a leech. His breath smelled of carrion.

In the Human-Nosferan war, the Nosferans consumed the human dead. Carrion eaters, and creatures of nightmares hated across the Rim, and I had one clinging to my back.

“Esteemed One?” Drac whispered against my neck, as close as a lover.

That was a stomach-churning thought.

“Let’s move.”

The scatter cloth was essentially see-through, a thin veil between us and the darkening tunnel. My dark-adapted eyes let me see in much lower light levels than regular humans. Despite that, it wasn’t long before there wasn’t any reflected moonlight reaching us.

My Euzebian scent-sight isn’t affected by darkness. It affords me a three-sixty view of everything around me, interpreting scents in such detail that I can see everything around me.

Except I had to open up my neck slits and let it all in, Drac’s stink along with the rest. To my scent-sight, the world is ghostly, insubstantial at times and always dissolving.

Both Drac and I were strong sources of light. His pearly and white, my own a more golden color. Scents rendered a visual image in my mind. It had been like this when I first came out of the Moreau Pod after the Euzebian modifications. It had taken time for my eyes and the scent-sight to learn to work together. For a short time, I went about blind-folded, relying entirely on the scent-sight to find my way.

I moved forward down the narrow tunnel. The water rushed beneath us. Drac clung to my back. The scattering cloth clung to us, wrapping itself down around us. It had a faint chemical smell, only a whiff, nothing more than a faint gray cloud to my scent-sight, hardly there at all.

Biocrete lining the passage gave off a faint bluish-white glow, blurring and brighter near the water. The tunnel continued ahead several meters and then curved to the right.

After a few minutes of making my way along the tunnel, it widened, and there appeared a biocrete walkway on the right side. I stepped up onto it, pleased to find that I could stand upright. Drac still didn’t let go. As long as we stayed beneath the scattering cloth, we needed to stay close.

This section of the passage was clearly carved out of the rock, shaped, and then coated with biocrete. Even so, it looked rough, with odd outgrowths that swelled in circular rings on the ceiling.

Lights. Off, at the moment, but they must have hung grow lights down here to grow the biocrete when the tunnel was carved. The biocrete around the lights had grown faster than the rest. Now the biocrete was all dormant and fixed.

The stream flowed down a straight channel in the center of the tunnel. From up ahead came a faint hum. A faint vibration ran through the biocrete beneath my feet.

We were close to something. Hopefully an access point.

I took another step and heard metal sliding against rock. I stopped.

As far as my scent-sight told me, the passage was empty. The sound continued. A rasping, dragging metal against stone sound.

It grew louder, or closer. Maybe both.

“Can you see anything?” I whispered to Drac.

“No.”

I concentrated on the scents in the passage. A damp breeze flowed through the passage, carrying with it an algae odor, and something else.

Focusing more, I took in deep breaths, pulling as much air as possible through the scatter cloth hanging over my face.

Faint blue sparks floated in the air, carried by the breeze. With them came traces of an electrical, ozone smell. A few darker metallic, oily specks drifted along closer to the floor. A cloud of biocrete dust mingled with the rest. It wasn’t much, but it suggested something.

A non-organic, a synthetic. Somewhere ahead in the dark. It could be a simple machine, but I doubted it. This was the guardian of the passage. It gave off little scent, making it difficult for my scent-sight to see it.

I’d run into this before, aliens or other things that my brain couldn’t imagine from the scant information their odors provided.

Like vision, the images that the scent-sight produced came as much from my mind’s ability to interpret and extrapolate based on the scent as it did from the scents themselves. Scents were rich in information, adding a time component as molecules degraded, but at times a poor substitute for sight.

The rasping sound continued to come closer, sliding and grinding, a sinuous sound. Muriel and Dyami were lost while we pursued Kelwyn, a Moreau and mass murderer that had taken on a snake-like form, his lower body completely replaced by a serpent’s tail.

This sounded like that, except metallic, and smelling like a non-organic. And too close for comfort.

“Slide off,” I said to Drac.

“Leave the cloth and be exposed!”

“Run into a sentry, and we’re exposed anyway. Slide off and stay put.”

Drac let go and slipped off my back. I pulled out my Lottier 65 and flicked on the side light, sweeping up the scatter cloth and stepping out in the same motion.